that sounds good. in playing games like burning wheel, every roll involves conflict. you look for it, so the idea of backing out of conflict seems kind of against my nature. i can see how the feel of dust devils might just make for more storytelling/narrative and perhaps lest conflict scenes. it just forces the players to push each other harder. i guess my first game with the new rules just felt extreme. maybe i just have/had some extreme luck. i guess i'll just have to dive into some more dust devils fun to see what happens.

To confirm, yep, that's largely part of the design. Players have to weigh two things:

1) Deciding whether this thing (the conflict) is worth inflicting or suffering violence. (And, as the book explains, this isn't always bullets and blood, literally.)

2) "Playing it safe" by avoiding conflicts often isn't very fun. Dust Devils is especially good when players conflict with one another, rather than all the Dealer's supporting characters, for example. Either way -- that is, whether inter-player conflict or not -- playing it safe seems to me to be more of a tradition among RPGs in which the goal is to survive and "keep playing" rather than resolve a great story. Dust Devils is more about the latter than the former. D&D (a fine game) is more about the former, as are many, many others.

My experience is that people pretty quickly work through these two things. Frequently, they are gamers, and I watch them "let go" of some assumptions and just have fun with a wild time in Dust Devils. That's one of my main goals in creating the game.